I was slightly disappointed by Enjoying It: Candy Crush and Capitalism but I’ve come away from it with one core concept stuck in my mind. The author distinguishes between what he calls ‘productive’ and ‘unproductive’ enjoyment: the former is that which ‘serves’ social and cultural structures, while the latter is pointless activity which serves no purpose. I take his point to be that, say, a high minded enjoyment of work is ‘productive enjoyment’ (or maybe blogging about social theory) while a game like the cat simulator I’m embarrassed to admit that I’ve been playing for the last month counts as ‘unproductive enjoyment’.
He argues that we fail to recognise the radical potential in unproductive enjoyment while failing to recognise the conformist compliance in productive enjoyment. In doing so, we obscure the relation between them, with unproductive and productive enjoyments forming two sides of the organisation of desire in contemporary capitalism. His argument here isn’t clear to me, as he seems to say that ‘unproductive enjoyment’ naturalises a sense of joyless work by implicitly treating it as something from which we need mindless distractions, while also trying to sustain a view that we take enjoyment from work. Nonetheless, I think he opens up some really interesting questions about the proliferation of ‘unproductive enjoyments’ against a context of the intensification of (insecure) work.
Mark Carrigan 